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Newspapers Compete to Attract Younger Readers

By Marlon A. Walker
Black College Wire

"Red Eye" is the Chicago Tribune's effort to create reading habit among younger readers.

Wanted: Adults, 18-25 years old, socially active, TV watchers, Web surfers, don’t read newspapers.

Editors at newspapers across the country are trying to find ways to attract this audience to their pages. So, from Chicago to Phoenix, newspapers have turned to tabloids geared to reeling in the Web-surfing generation.

“Our No. 1 goal was to create a newspaper reading habit among younger readers,” said Jane Hirt, co-editor of Red Eye, a newspaper started by the Chicago Tribune in October. “It’s a big opportunity to get them into the habit.”

It also means more competition. As soon as the Tribune’s Red Eye hit the market, the Chicago Sun-Times countered with its own Red Streak within a week. The upshot is a battle for young adults.

Newspapers in Boise, Idaho; Lansing, Mich.; and Phoenix have launched weekly tabloids focusing on issues for adults in the 25-34 age group. According to an article on the Gannett Web site, the target papers cover issues that the age group faces, but also includes “authoritative content and depth.”

YES in Phoenix, Noise in Lansing and THRIVE in Boise cover local fashion and entertainment, along with features on home décor and relationships.

The Tribune’s Red Eye started on Oct. 25 as a way to lure young, urban commuters using Chicago’s train system back into reading the daily news through the newspaper. Hirt said that research found the younger audience turning to new media such as the Internet as a primary source for news.

“There are a lot of people who for some reason didn’t like the traditional newspaper,” she said.

The result: a 40-page, tabloid-size newspaper printed Monday through Friday and with newspaper boxes stationed near the city’s mass transit systems. Wednesday’s 60-page paper includes a special entertainment guide pulled from metromix.com, an online entertainment guide owned by the Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune.

“We are going for the socially active,” Hirt said.

So is the Chicago Sun-Times.

“We got wind of their plans to put out a paper, and we wanted to defend our turf,” said Deborah Douglas, editor of the Red Streak.

Douglas said the Sun-Times was rightful owner of the 18-to-25 demographic that the Red Eye sought.

“Basically we said we had them or else why would they try to get them?” she said.

The Sun-Times’ counterattack covered the same ground as the Red Eye — a tabloid-style newspaper focused more on entertainment that also contains shorter news stories.

“We wanted to look like them, sound like them and confuse the market,” she said.

But the Sun-Times project didn’t come without controversy.

The Sun-Times brought in a dozen reporters from other area papers owned by its parent company, Hollinger International Inc., to help out the Red Streak. The problem was that the Sun-Times is a part of the Newspaper Guild.

“None of the people were in the Guild, and the Red Streak started as a version of the Sun-Times,” Douglas said.

Since it would continue to be a part of the Sun-Times, the reporters were sent back to their home papers, with the exception of four who were hired.

Douglas said the newspaper has become more than it originally set out to be.

“In the beginning, we said our business plan was to be a spoiler in the market,” she said. “But we’ve evolved past them. We give it to (the readers) quick and fast.”

Red Eye co-editor Hirt said competition from the Red Streak has meant stepped up efforts to give the reader the best product for their money. And because the Chicago Tribune prints 100,000 copies of the Red Eye each day — that continue to be taken off the stands — Hirt and her colleagues are not worried.

“We’ve raised our game,” she said. “It has forced us to innovate even faster.

“Competition is always good.”

Marlon A. Walker is a student at Florida A&M University who wrote this for The ASNE Reporter, the student newspaper of the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention in New Orleans.

Posted April 10, 2003

© Copyright 2003 The American Society of Newspaper Editors